You Decide: When Will China Surpass America?

Who says analyzing the battle for economic hegemony between China and the U.S. can't be fun?

The Economist has created
a tool that allows readers to estimate the year in which China will overtake America
as the world's largest economy. All you need to do is enter assumptions
about how much gross domestic product (GDP) and
inflation will grow in China and the U.S per year, and how much the Chinese yuan
will increase in value over time

The Economist's Ryan Avent at the Free Exchange blog provides some pointers:

Given
reasonable assumptions, China will pull ahead within the next ten
years. if you play around with the interactive, you'll find that this
isn't particularly sensitive to changes in the variables. If you double
expected American growth from 2.5% per year to 5% per year, you push
the key date back from 2019 to...2022. If you then slow China's growth
to 5% annually, you delay il sorpasso to 2028. Absent a total disaster
in China, the transition will take place, and that right soon. Why?
Well, China remains far behind the developed world in per capita terms,
and because there is plenty of catch-up left to accomplish, there's
plenty of room for rapid growth. And China's population is enormous. It
has over four times as many people as America, and so its output per
capita only needs to be about a fourth of America's to match it in
total size.

Avent also wonders how America's transfer of global leadership to China will work:

Exactly
once in the history of the industrialised world has a dominant great
power lost its status to another dominant great power, and that already
tiny sample size is of limited use in informing us about the future.
Britain and America shared a language, a culture, and a general
political philosophy of liberalism and democracy. They were explicit
friends and allies. Perhaps most important, they were both rich, in per
capita terms. Chinese culture is alien to Americans, and its primary
political values appear to be quite different from those of the world's
current hegemon. The two countries are not enemies, but their
relationship is explicitly adversarial. And while America is rich,
hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens will remain extremely poor at
the time China assumes the top spot in the GDP league tables.